Chatbots for financial and other applications aren’t just a cool new thing. They’re a necessity! They solve the worsening problem of too many options to choose from on shrinking screens, with unhelpful help screens.
Do you access your financial accounts online? If you do, perhaps you’ll remember that the first time you tried to do something, you had the fun of poring over the menu system to find what button to click, sometimes only to reach another screen full of buttons and menus. On the plus side, online financial systems let you get a lot done. On the minus side, jumping through the hoops to actually get them to do what you want can be a long slog. Have you ever gotten frustrated and tried to click on Help? And gotten the long, unhelpful Help stuff? Helped a whole lot, didn’t it?
Today, nice big screens with high resolution, sitting on a desk somewhere, are used less and less. Cute, portable little screens with phone and camera built in are used more and more, partly because it’s in your pocket, right there when you need it. What happens to all those giant screens packed with menu choices? I guess the designers could have reduced the typeface so much that you’d need a magnifying glass to read them, but they bowed to reality and put just a few menu choices on each screen. Nice to read, but the result is that your multi-screen journey to get to the one you want got even longer. Assuming you remember how to get there. And what if you want something more elaborate, like how close am I getting to hitting my budget for restaurants this month? Fuggedabout it.
The designers of mobile apps for financial applications aren’t between a rock and a hard place. It’s worse. They’re stuck way back in a long, narrow cave that floods. What to do?
Echo and Siri have been training us to just ask for things. Who won the game last night? What’s the weather forecast? Even jokes! But banks … now that’s a different matter altogether. Banks are serious things. There’s money involved. Not just any money – MY money!
So what’s a bank app creator supposed to do?
It’s actually pretty simple, because there’s not much choice. If you want the bank app to be, you know, USED by the people who have it, you have to make it USABLE. Period. There’s not enough room for menus, except maybe a couple super-popular buttons. Help files? Waste of time. You’re down to one choice: make it so you can TALK (or chat) to the app, and ask it to do stuff for you.
That’s the logic. Even better, it’s really happening. In real life!
Bank of America is advertising its chatbot Erica heavily in some parts of the country. The reason is simple: they want their customers to be able to USE the BofA app, not be frustrated by it. There’s the chatbot technology provider Kasisto (Disclosure: Oak HC/FT is an investor) used by multiple banks to power human interactions. The bar has now been raised for financial institutions with apps.
Let’s review some history. Years ago, what financial institutions had to have was a website for customers to access their accounts. As smartphones spread, the bar was raised: OK, you’ve got a website, but do you have an app? Not having an app was a reason for customers to move to a place that did. Just as most of the financial institutions were breathing sighs of relief that they’ve caught up, the bar is raised again: you mean we have to make the app USABLE? What’s a chatbot, anyway? The pattern here is clear: technology keeps marching along, some financial institution applies it to their customers’ and their own benefit, and the others scramble to catch up. What’s next?
To find out what’s next, all we have to do is look at the non-financial domains that use chatbots. For example, look at Amazon’s Echo. It started out pretty primitive, but it’s adding capabilities all the time – as Amazon puts it, new “skills.” The bar is already being raised by technology vendors in two specific, technically challenging areas:
It’s one thing to answer a simple question, like what’s my balance? But real chatting as done by people requires that the chatbot take into account complex questions, context and history.
A complex question requires doing some real “thinking.” For example, “How much did I spend on eating out last month?” has loads of complexity. The system has to know that “eating out” means spending money on the merchant category “restaurants.” It’s got to find all those transactions that took place in the month before today’s month, add them up and give you the answer.
Taking conversation history and context in account is even trickier. Suppose you get the answer to the eating out question. Suppose you now ask “ How about the prior month?” Easy for a human; for a bot, not easy at all! The bot has to figure out that you’re still talking about eating out (restaurants) and that you want the total for a month. It’s also got to figure out that you want not last month, but the one before that. These are the kind of amazing interactions supported by Kasisto.
Chatbots for financial apps are just being rolled out to solve the otherwise unsolvable problem of screen real estate. Even though we’re still in the early roll-out stages, the next battle is clear. Most of today’s chatbots are in elementary school – soon they’ll need to graduate to middle school!
A slightly different version of this post originally appeared in Forbes.
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